Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 17

With very little transition time, my mother rented a broken-down houseboat for us to move into. A rather small live-aboard in the harbor in Redondo Beach, it was all she could afford with the meager child support check and no job or other source of support. It was an ancient two-story houseboat that seemed like it had been built in the time of the Swiss Family Robinson, with a massive, rusty mast, creaky stairs, a broken toilet, and a foot of water in the hull that we had to drain with a saucepan each morning so as to be sure we wouldn’t sink. But of course, these things didn’t seem like problems to my 4-year-old mind. I thought the boat was the most wonderful place in the world, and what an amazing mother I had who had brought us from that odd house we’d been shipwrecked in to this amazing house that swayed with the tide and communed with the fish, algae and waves.

My days were spent commanding a troupe of fellow harbor kids. I was the leader in a complex game that began with the creation of a story and always included a search-and-destroy mission, mystery, spy plan or some other exciting kid process that made absolutely no sense at all. It was one of the best times of my life, spent in the pursuit of sheer fun.

Each after-school adventure began with me perched on the top of one of the square fire extinguisher boxes that sat at the end of each slip, concocting that day’s story while I spoke to the core members of the team, three 5- to 6-year-olds soiled with the sheen of sweat and the film of school dust, their eyes shining with the endless possibilities of our next “mission.” There was Bobby Sandler, whose dad was an alcoholic fisherman who supplied us with endless stories of when he was “a fisherman in the Sahara.” Most nights of the week he would stagger home at 3:00 A.M. from the Dock of the Bay Bar & Grill with a different woman each night, promising that she was the one he’d been looking for all along to be a mom for his son. Felicité Marcus was a Haitian girl whose parents, a beautiful French-African mother and a green-eyed fisherman father, had been married and divorced six times and had traveled several times around the world. They fought daily about whether to stay or to leave for France, yelling about which one of them would kill the other and which weapon they would use. And finally there was my best, saddest friend, Cindy, who lived with her father on a boat littered with used Budweiser cans, with no refrigerator and a barely working toilet. Her mismatched clothes were always soiled and/or torn and her shoes never fit right. Cindy was always slightly afraid and maintained an expressionless gaze, frequently asking me if I thought her mother would ever come back.

“The people at the end of this dock who live in the yacht are actually the owners of the whole world, and they’re planning to blow up the harbor tonight before they leave because they don’t want anyone to know who they are or what they do. You see, there was a crash last week in the middle of the ocean and everyone thought it was a storm but it was actually a bomb they planted in the hull of another yacht that was trying to get their power. And they didn’t just hurt all the members of the crew and the other rich people, they hurt all the fish and animals with that bomb,” I whispered the last sentence for effect.

“Ooh,” the team let out a thrilled sigh.

“So what are we going to do?”

“We have to sabotage their plans.”

“What if we get caught?” Cindy whispered. She was always afraid of getting caught.

“Cindy, you know we never get caught.”

Nights (before my strictly enforced 9:00 P.M. bedtime) were a silly blur, filled with my mother’s series of disgruntled but hilarious English-rocker-style boyfriends who were constantly “fixing” the boat—one could usually be found dangling precariously over the bow in full mod attire, swearing and spitting in a proper cockney accent. I’m not sure if my mom was having as much fun as I was, but I didn’t think about it very much really, since I was only four years old.

The bizarre and wonderful boat that went nowhere only lasted for one summer, ending in what would become historically known as Dee and Tiny’s first eviction. We were evicted from the yacht harbor because our boat wasn’t new enough to be docked there, one of several evictions issued that summer to old houseboats that belonged to poor people with nowhere else to go. It seemed that live-aboards didn’t create the proper environment for the sailor-class the harbor was hoping to attract.

Our next move was to a small stucco duplex in lower Redondo Beach, a solidly lower-middle-class area known for its racist police force, plethora of oil rigs and the perpetual stink of natural gas.

The duplex, painted a dark, mustard brown, was owned by a boyfriend of Annie’s, and so she was paying very low rent and could pass on a similar deal to my mom. The small building sat forlornly on a cul-de-sac, and there were exactly nine things on that street: an oil rig that perpetually rocked up and down, in and out of the tired earth; three houses with weak-eyed, underfed dogs and weak-eyed, underweight, poor white kids; two houses with brightly dressed, perfectly groomed Latino children and the sweet smell of tamales wafting out from the broken screen doors; an old-man house with a gnarled man who never seemed to leave his dusty window except to threaten the neighborhood kids with his shotgun; a tiny elementary school with a cracked asphalt playground; and a mortuary, the neatest, nicest building on the street.

I later learned that my mother had her first bout of agoraphobia in that house. Every day when I came home from the little elementary school’s meager kindergarten she was there, not there like a stay-at-home mom but there like she was stuck, caught by the threads of the shag carpet, unable even to dance her way out.

Dancing always carried my mother and me in and out of happiness. All my life, I was schooled in dance at the wild heels of my mother. My dance “lessons” began in that Redondo Beach duplex. Each day after school I witnessed my mother performing a fascinating mix of body contortions, moving across our living room floor to an extremely loud recording of Little Richard or some other driving rhythm. She never talked about her daily dance sessions, she just did them, as one would perform a sacred unspoken ritual. And no matter how depressed or hopeless she was, for that magical hour as Little Richard, Sly and the Family Stone, Donna Summer, and other favorites played on the stereo, her life and problems, reality and desperation melted away into a beautiful world of blood-boiling, heart-racing, old-school rhythm-and-blues, gospel, rock-and-roll, and disco.

It was at this point that Czatar Rudolph (aka, Rudy) entered her life. Rudy was a “refugee” from communist Hungary, but Rudy wasn’t one of those privileged Europeans, educated, sophisticated, scholarly. Rudy was Eastern European ghetto communist, a 99-cent-store-shoppin’ petty criminal, a domestic violence perpetrator with full-on pimpin’ ’70s platform heels, wide-flared jeans, shiny shirts and a big golden fro. I suppose he would have been considered a fox back then, but I just thought he was mean and stupid, partly because he was, but mostly because he represented competition for my mother’s affection and, even more important to me, her attention. I had just turned five years old and wanted to be the only thing in her world.

My cousin Annie was holed up in the back unit of the duplex in the throes of her own version of agoraphobia. “I’m not leaving the house till my hair grows long, hon,” she would say in her most seductive little girl voice. She lived on free cheese and the kindness of strangers. Or, to be exact, the kindness of her long-suffering, endlessly annoyed boyfriend. Her tiny house faced a very large yard filled with yellowish grass, bits of chicken wire and fragments of dented car parts, the ground thumping every five seconds when the oil rig that shadowed the yard would enter its well.

At first it was wonderful between my mother and Annie, but eventually my mother’s love turned into a desperate dependence. Days and nights of darkening depression made her increasingly needy, which was completely intolerable to Annie, who had no reserves of strength to care for anyone but herself and was barely holding her own self together. One terrible day, I came home from school to find my cousin screaming at the top of her lungs in a shrill, bloodcurdling tone,“Get away from me, Debbie! GET AWAY!” Her lips were drawn over tightly clenched teeth, and she emitted a low, menacing growl. The scream and the growl were common to all of the overworked and overwrought women in my family, prone to extreme bouts of dark anger, calling forth in those moments all of their collective years of pain and torture. A deafening silence filled with unspoken vows of revenge was established between my mother and Annie, and life in the little house became even more tense and uncertain.

My mother’s sheer desperation was transformed into a determined focus. She decided that she would finally finish school; after ten years of serial dropouts and false starts, she would get her Masters of Social Work against all odds, and she would look fine in the process. While the destructive Rudy scenario played out against the backdrop of Annie’s rejection, she busily applied to graduate schools. Six months later she managed to finesse her acceptance into a graduate program in social work at Fresno State University with some resourceful storytelling and sans the math part of the GRE exam.

My mom spirited away in an Angela Davis fro, with her collection of hand-sewn, hand-dyed dashiki-esque dresses and a cosmetically distributed tan. The effect was devastating, she looked like a mixed-race queen, rocking fierce tropical colors and revolutionary possibilities. Well, she was from L.A. where it was enough to look like a revolutionary—you didn’t actually have to be one. In this cloud of appropriated radicalism, we landed in Fresno.

But in Fresno you couldn’t really rock the “sort-of revolutionary” thing. For a person of color, Fresno was all about blending in. Fresno was a hick town with a college thrown down in the middle of it, and the only radicalism that existed was the United Farm Workers movement—brown power/black power were only just getting started. The San Joaquin Valley, dripping with the fresh juice of grapes, the luscious, omnipresent scent of apples, apricots, alfalfa, cherries and lettuce, took to things “in due time” and the rest of the world would just have to wait—it may have been the mid-’70s and the world outside was blowing itself up, but so what, there were crops to harvest and mini-malls to build, and besides, how much could you really think about in 106-degree weather anyway? Consequently, the two African American radicals on campus resented my mother for what they perceived as her attempt to “pass” as a white person when it was clear to them that she was black. And the white people were nervous around her because she was clearly only half-white and identifying, even if only stylistically, with a radical like Angela Davis, well, that was just plain crazy.

Suffice to say she toned everything down within about five months, not because she was intimidated—that would be giving up, and my mom never gave up, even when it would have been easier or more pleasurable to do so. No, it was because she couldn’t work the fro, do her homework, handwash the dashikis and get to an 8 A.M. class on time.

“Her parents are D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D.” My life in Fresno, at least for the first six months, was another kind of hell. My parents were divorced, a fact that had meant little or nothing in Los Angeles where almost all of my friends’ parents had been divorced, or for that matter had never even been married. But in Fresno, every introduction, every conversation or casual exchange began with the announcement that I was the child of divorced parents, proving that somehow I was surely strange. In Fresno, and in fact the whole San Joaquin Valley, it seemed that everyone was married. It didn’t matter that most of these married people were rather frightening in their extreme conventionality, or their front of extreme conventionality. Replete with bubble hairdos and polyester matching suits for both men and women, the bottom line was that they were married and therefore had a church-sanctioned family in the eyes of God, and therefore—in the limited logic of kids—they were normal.

But of course, in the end we were kids, and divorced parents or not, I was almost six and they were six, and so we had fun. In Fresno this meant a new kind of fun, a variety of which I never had before or since: this was country fun. Trees, rivers, streams, farm animals, fields, meadows, straw, lakes of all shapes and sizes, hot nights with micro-flies filling your nostrils and gallons and gallons of lemonade.

Although my mom was surviving on less than $300 a month in child support and financial aid, she managed to provide me with healthy food which she taught me to cook—she’d taught me to make my own breakfast at the age of four but I now graduated to the wonderfulness of making dinner. She was able to pay the rent and buy me the requisite Fresnoesque school clothes so I’d be able to sort of fit in to the rural-meets-strip-mall style that dominated the Fresno school district. I loved my life with her then. She laughed a lot, studied a lot and teased me a lot. She was spending her spare time with Palestinian college students who lectured her about Allah and what was wrong with America while flirting with her mercilessly. She also managed to do some in-school work with the UFW movement, a project befitting her as-yet-unidentified raza soul. And she began to collaborate with a very sweet African American church-going man who used to invite us to a tiny one-room church in Modesto (a nearby town even more hick-like and farm-filled) where my mother could fulfill her need for some of the best down-home gospel that we’d ever hear in our lives.

In later years, my mother would always bemoan the loss of the tight-knit community she had found in graduate school. We would talk for hours about what had made that experience fulfilling, yet at the same time boring. She had people with whom she shared an intellectual kinship, the excitement of what she was learning, and an internship at the local mental hospital for the criminally insane.

And yet, even with all of those focused activities, along with the Palestinian guys and the African American man-friend, it was no match for the exciting, dangerous and vindictive Czatar Rudolph who was waiting, always waiting and cheating in the smog-filled cavern that is Los Angeles.

“Come back, Debbie,” he would whisper to her on his visits from L.A., his golden fro framing his angry scowl in the afternoon sun that swept across the Fresno landscape.“Come back so we can be together,” the whisper and the plan would trail off slowly, like a snake hypnotizing his prey, readying for the strike.

So at the end of the two-year graduate program we headed back to the murky and insecure world of Rudy, the San Fernando Valley and no job prospects. There was something new and lost about my mother in this time. The sad reality is that my un-parented, poverty-stricken mama never had any role models for success, no advice on problem solving as the problems arose, no ideas on how to make plans for the future, no support for setting goals. She had taught herself to survive, but was never taught to thrive. And if one takes a break from the terror/excitement/challenge of sheer survival, there can be a void of emptiness, a black hole of confusion and anxiety, a void easily filled by the challenge, excitement, and endless impossibility of the Rudy’s of the world.